The Doctor Wore Petticoats: Women Physicians of the Old West

by Enss, Chris

  Doctor La Flesche Picotte died on September 18, 1916, at the age of fifty. The Times newspaper in Walthill, Nebraska, reported that “her life was dedicated to their [Indian] needs . . . to the furtherance of . . . their personal and collective welfare . . . as she always gave willingly to her people.”

  The hospital Susan helped build was declared a national landmark in 1993. It is now a community center. A plaque outside the facility commemorates Susan’s accomplishments and simply reads: DOCTOR LA FLESCHE PICOTTE, THE FIRST WOMAN PHYSICIAN AMONG HER PEOPLE.

  SUSAN ANDERSON

  COLORADO HEALER

  I came here (Colorado) to die, but since I didn’t get the job done, I

  guess I’ll just have to live here instead.

  —Doctor Susan Anderson, 1907

  A dazzling setting sun cast long shadows of birch and eucalyptus trees over the small cabin they surrounded near Fraser, Colorado. The home’s sole occupant, Doctor Susan Anderson, admired the golden shafts of light streaming in through a half-opened window and onto the pages of the opened Bible in her lap. A light breeze washed over her delicate frame and she turned her attractive face into the wind. She brushed back her dark hair and closed her blue eyes for a moment. Doctor Anderson was tired. She had moved to Fraser in 1907 to rest and to try to overcome the tuberculosis that had assaulted her lungs. Although the recovery had been slow, she was now on the mend and longed to resume her medical practice.

  Women doctors were not well received in western communities in the early nineteenth century. In the one-year period Susan Anderson had lived in the quaint town, her services were called upon very few times and only when male doctors were unavailable.

  The attention she gained after stitching up a rancher’s injured horse had attracted some human clients, but not many. She was confident that, given time, she could prove her value and grow her business. Meanwhile, she was content to drink in the fresh air and enjoy a peaceful evening.

  DOCTOR SUSAN ANDERSON STANDING AT HER COLORADO CABIN WITH HER BROTHER AND FATHER

  A boy’s voice in the near distance coaxed Doctor Anderson out of her comfortable chair and to the door. The frantic young man ran up the dirt road to the modest house, calling out the doctor’s name with every step. As soon as he arrived, he blurted out news of a sick baby who needed Susan’s help. He was sent to bring the “woman doctor” to the ailing infant, some fifteen minutes away. After learning that the town’s male physicians were not able to attend to the child, Susan grabbed up her black leather bag and followed the lad back to town.

  Doctor Anderson met her patient’s worried parents at the train depot. The father hovered over his pregnant wife as she cradled their tiny one-year-old daughter in her arms. The doctor looked into the tear-filled eyes of the mother as the father pulled back the ragged blanket wrapped around the infant. The baby was extremely thin, her breathing was labored, and her eyelids were swollen. Although she had never seen such an advanced case, Susan was certain the child was suffering from scurvy a disease caused by a deficiency of Vitamin C.

  The desperate couple, whose faces and hands wore the scars of years of laboring in the fields, watched Doctor Anderson examine their baby. She gently questioned them about the girl’s age and what they had been feeding her. They told the doctor that the baby was breast-fed for a while, but was now on canned milk. The homesteaders believed that canned milk was an adequate substitute. Doctor Anderson knew better.

  After checking the little girl’s gums and listening to her heartbeat, Susan gently stroked the baby’s face with the back of her hand. She hesitated a bit before shaking her head. She apologized and told the anxious parents that there was nothing she could do.

  Doctor Anderson blinked away a tear, then turned her attention to the distraught mother. She instructed the woman on the importance of regularly eating fresh vegetables and fruit and warned the grieving father against working his wife so hard. She further told the pair to stay away from canned milk, advising them to feed any other babies they might have with mother’s or goat’s milk.

  The baby whimpered and her sobbing mother tried to make her comfortable. Doctor Anderson demanded that the couple bring the child they were expecting to her after it was born. The father searched his ragged suit of clothing over for money. After a few minutes, he sadly turned his empty pockets out and hung his head in shame. Susan told him that money was unimportant in such matters. She promised to have them arrested if they didn’t comply with her request, however. The pair agreed and left the depot to spend the last remaining hours of their baby’s life at their home.

  The life of a doctor in the Old West was a terrible one at times, but Susan had come to expect such difficulties. The journey from her childhood to becoming a doctor had been a trying one, but she had persevered and realized her calling to help preserve lives.

  Susan was born on January 31, 1870, in Nevada Mills, Indiana. Her mother, Mayra Pile, was her earliest female influence. Kind-hearted and protective, Mayra encouraged her daughter to read and write at an early age. Susan’s father, William H. Anderson, was a farmer. He would live out his dream of being a doctor through his daughter.

  Susan’s parents divorced in 1875 and shortly thereafter, William left the area with his daughter and two-year-old son. Susan and her brother, John, were brokenhearted about leaving their mother. For reasons unknown to the Anderson children, William wanted no part of Mayra, and forbid his son and daughter from interacting with her as well. The three moved to Wichita, Kansas, where William homesteaded a farm along with his mother, father, and brother.

  In time the Anderson’s Kansas farm was as successful as their homestead in Indiana. William not only had a knack for agriculture, but was also gifted in nursing hurt and sick animals back to health. It was a talent he passed on to Susan. William doted on his daughter and encouraged her to be well read and knowledgeable in a variety of subjects. One of the areas she excelled in was Morse code. In her early teens, she let her father know that she wanted to be a telegrapher. William discouraged the notion and suggested she set her sights higher. He was determined for her to become a doctor. Susan dutifully obeyed her father.

  Not long after graduating from high school, Susan and her brother moved to Colorado with their father and his new wife. The Andersons arrived in Cripple Creek in 1892. William traded his interest in farming for a career in gold mining. Susan’s focus remained on medicine, and in the summer of 1893 she enrolled as a medical student at the University of Michigan.

  With the exception of one class, the limited number of female students at the Ann Arbor school attended most lectures with their male counterparts. The anatomy course, however, was segregated. The largely male faculty considered the separation of the sexes in such a setting appropriate.

  In addition to keeping up with her daily studies, Susan took on an evening internship at a local hospital. Her schedule was brutal, allowing little if any time for sleep. She contracted tuberculosis from a patient of hers and developed a persistent cough that would stay with her the rest of her life. As her medical skills flourished, her health suffered. She graduated from medical school on June 5, 1897. Rather than take a position offered to her at the Women’s Hospital in Philadelphia, she decided to move back to Colorado in hopes that the climate there would help her lungs.

  When Susan viewed her graduation day pictures, she saw that they clearly showed the effects tuberculosis was having on her. In a letter to her brother, she alluded to her poor health, and how certain garments helped camouflage the dark shadows on her face.

  I have had some pictures taken. I will send you the proofs if I can find them. The ones in the black dress were taken first and I didn’t like the dress so I put on a white waist and had them taken over. . . . The cheek hollow does not show so plain in it.

  Shortly after Doctor Anderson arrived in Cripple Creek, she decided to set up her own practice. The congested area already had fifty-five doctors and ten dentists, none of them female. Susan attracted many women t
o her office, helping them through illnesses men could not relate to. Her proficiency in cleaning wounds and staving off infections saved injured limbs from amputation and restored good health to women and men alike in the area. Her growing practice buoyed her spirits and kept the tuberculosis from worsening.

  Doctor Anderson’s health was further enhanced after she met the man of her dreams and they decided to marry. She felt a touch of her tuberculosis slip away as she happily made wedding plans. But the progress she was making quickly took a downward turn as a succession of unfortunate events invaded her life. On the day of the wedding, moments before the ceremony was to begin, Susan’s fiancé left her at the altar.

  While putting the pieces of her broken heart back together, she received news that her brother had come down with influenza. She rushed to be with him, but didn’t make it in time. She made note of her tremendous loss in her journal:I came back to Cripple Creek to live again. Life seems so useless and in vain. No one now cares much whether I live or die. John was my best friend on earth and now my best friend is in heaven.

  In an effort to bring herself out of the depressed state she was in, Doctor Anderson decided to leave Cripple Creek and travel around Colorado. In the spring of 1901, she briefly settled down in Denver and opened an office, but her practice failed within six months due to the glut of physicians already established in the city. She then relocated to Greeley, a thriving farming community 54 miles away. Instead of going into business for herself again, she took a job as a nurse at the local hospital.

  Susan’s mental state improved while in Greeley, but her physical condition worsened. When a typhoid epidemic invaded the region, she decided to move and not risk her health. This time she settled in Fraser, Colorado. She rented a cabin and focused on nursing herself back to full health. She ate well, exercised, and rested. Her stamina increased, and in less than a year the consumption was in recession.

  Susan’s need for an income and the town’s need for an additional doctor persuaded her to set up another office. Once Doctor Anderson had proven herself to the community, she was called on day and night.

  In the winter of 1908, she was summoned to the bedside of a young man who was suffering from pneumonia. When she arrived on the scene, the ailing teenager was surrounded by his worried family. The boy was lying on a cot next to a lit stove, shivering under a mound of blankets. He had a bad cold and a high temperature. Doctor Anderson examined the patient and contemplated her course of action. The helpless but trusting look on the faces of the boy’s parents and siblings prompted her to pursue an unusual treatment she believed would save his life.

  She instructed the family members to fill washtubs with water and boil it. She needed clean blankets, several pitchers, and bowls. Once all those items were made available, she pulled the covers off the sick boy, sat him in the tub of hot water, draped a blanket over his shoulders, and opened all the windows.

  Over the next several hours, Doctor Anderson drenched the teenager with water from head to toe, telling him to breathe in the fresh air as she poured the pitchers and bowls of liquid over him. As he did so, she thumped on his chest, dislodging the phlegm built up in his lungs. Just before dawn, the boy’s fever broke, and he was well on his way to a full recovery.

  Many of Doctor Anderson’s patients lived in forests, ranches, or lumber camps. The carriage ride to and from their homes could be long and boring. To pass the time as she made her way to the sick or injured, she would practice shooting targets with her .38 revolver. The gun she carried was for protection from thieves and mountain lion attacks.

  Doctor Anderson’s reputation as a physician spread throughout the country. With every passing year, more and more people depended upon her skills as a surgeon and general practitioner. She mended bullet wounds, set broken limbs, and even removed a few abscessed teeth. She traveled from homestead to homestead, looking in on new mothers and babies and giving lectures on nutrition. She seldom, if ever, took any monetary payment from the most needy of patients. She was so revered that loggers, whom she had nursed back to health, built a new house for her as a show of appreciation.

  Doctor Anderson was so dedicated to the health and fitness of her patients that she risked her own well-being to respond to an emergency. When she was summoned to help injured rail workers in a nearby town, she fell into an engine pit while making her way to them. The fall left her with several bruises, burns, and broken ribs. She was rescued and taken to a friend’s home to recuperate. After dressing her wounds, she requested a corset from her caretaker. She was then laced into the garment, which held her ribs firmly in place. Within a few weeks, she was back on her feet.

  Doctor Anderson’s reputation extended beyond rural areas. Members of the staff at Colorado General Hospital in Denver recognized that she was an exceptional healer, and the best diagnostician west of the divide. Her honest business practices and her notoriety in medicine prompted Grand County, Colorado, politicians to appoint her as coroner. She accepted the position during the time that construction was in process for a new tunnel that would run through a mountain pass. The tunnel would replace a treacherous road that was often left impassable by heavy rain and snow.

  Doctor Anderson’s job required that she care for injured construction workers and challenge the tunnel commission to make labor conditions safe. Susan held the commission responsible for the nineteen deaths that occurred and the hundreds of men who were hurt or who got sick and died during the construction of the tunnel. In an emergency Doctor Anderson would venture into the 6-mile tunnel to give first aid to hurt men and help retrieve dead bodies.

  By 1925 Doctor Susan Anderson had spent thirty years working in medicine. Society was more tolerant of women doctors, but she still struggled against those who simply could not accept her in this nontraditional role. In an attempt to drive Susan from practicing medicine, some men staged embarrassing office calls. One particular afternoon a tunnel worker who had been drinking maneuvered an appointment with Susan. The slightly inebriated man pointed to his fly when describing the physical problem he was having. Doctor Anderson suggested he might feel more comfortable talking with a male physician, but he insisted he needed her help. On the off chance that the man had a legitimate complaint, Susan agreed to examine him.

  After being asked a few cursory questions, the man dropped his pants down around his ankles and stood staring at Susan. Unimpressed and with complete composure, she asked him what the problem was. He smiled and said, “Nothing. But ain’t it a dandy?” Susan calmly ordered the man to pull up his pants. As he did, she reached for a nearby scalpel. While he was reattaching his suspenders, she cocked her fist back and told him to get out of her office. She showed him the knife and his eyes widened. “If I ever see you again,” she warned, “I’ll slit your belly with a butcher’s knife.” Before the man left, she made him pay a $10 examination fee.

  The story of the life, times, and trials of Doctor Anderson made its way to many newspapers and magazines. Readers were fascinated with the tenacity and drive of the female pioneer doctor. The celebrated actress Ethel Barrymore was among her biggest fans. She sought out and Susan offered to make a movie about her life. Susan repeatedly turned her down.

  Doctor Anderson practiced medicine for more than fifty years. In 1958, at the age of eighty-eight, Susan was hospitalized and lived out the remainder of her days at Colorado General Hospital. She passed away on April 16, 1960 and was laid to rest near her brother John in the Mount Pisgah cemetery in Cripple Creek.

  NELLIE MATTIE MACKNIGHT

  BELOVED CALIFORNIA PHYSICIAN

  Taken as a whole they will probably never amount to much unless

  the experience of the past belies that of the future. While this is so,

  yet no person of extended views or liberal ideas can desire to see the

  doors of science closed against them.

  —Doctor R. Beverly Cole (a prominent male

  physician) in a speech delivered to members of

 
the California Medical Society, 1875

  Eighteen-year-old Nellie Mattie MacKnight stepped confidently into the spacious dissecting room at San Francisco’s Toland Hall Medical School. Thirty-five male students, stationed around cadavers spread out on rough board tables, turned to watch the bold young woman enter. The smell of decomposing corpses mixed with the tobacco smoke wafting from the pipes of several students assaulted Nellie’s senses. Her knees weakened a bit as she strode over to her appointed area, carrying a stack of books and a soft, rawhide case filled with operating tools.

  To her fellow students, Nellie was a delicate female with no business studying medicine. Determined to prove them wrong, she stood up straight, opened her copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and removed the medical instruments from the case.

  It was the spring of 1891. She nodded politely at the future doctors, who glowered at her in return. A tall, dapper, bespectacled professor stood at the front of the classroom, watching Nellie’s every move. The sour look on his face showed his disdain for a woman’s invasion into this masculine territory. “Do you expect to graduate in medicine or are you just playing around?” he snarled. The blood rushed to Nellie’s face and she clenched her fists at her side. She had expected this kind of hostile reception when she enrolled, but was taken aback just the same. “I hope to graduate,” she replied firmly. Disgusted and seeing that Nellie could not be intimidated, the professor turned around and began writing on the massive chalkboard behind him. The students quickly switched their attention from Nellie to their studies. Nellie grinned and whispered to herself, “I will graduate, and that’s a promise.”